Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain.

Recession’s Over!

The nation’s unemployment rate fell to 9.7 percent in January — breaking below the 10 percent mark from December

We win! U-S-A! U-S-A! Oops, that wasn’t the entire article.

–but the economy still lost 20,000 jobs, a sign that the economy is still struggling to create jobs.

Ah damn. Seriously though how fucked up is it that <10% unemployment is good news? If only poor people led to inflation, maybe Bernanke would pay some attention.

And what the fuck is this?

Christina Romer, who chairs the Council of Economic Advisers, said the report has “encouraging signs of gradual labor market healing.”

“This decline occurred despite a modest rise in the labor force,” she wrote on the White House blog.

Yeah, great. Unless there’s some period I’m unaware of where people stopped making babies and graduating high school every decline in unemployment happens despite an increase in the labor force.

At any rate, U6 went down even more which is actual honest-to-god good news indeed.

“The broadest measure of the unemployment rate, which includes all persons marginally attached to the labor force and workers working part time for economic reasons, fell almost a full percentage point. Obviously, the unemployment rate remains unacceptably high, and is even worse for certain demographic groups such as teenagers and black or African American workers.”